Principal Software Engineer

Overview

Principal Software Engineer on the Safety Foundation team, serving as hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers and building the infrastructure backbone that powers safety across Roblox.

What you'll do

• Serve as the hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers on the Safety Foundation team, setting technical direction, driving execution, and staying close to the code
• Lead the design and implementation of a scalable, cost-efficient platform engineered for 10x traffic growth
• Drive the AI-first transformation of the safety platform, architecting agentic and ML-integrated workflows with the security, auditability, and reliability that production safety systems require
• Build the developer experience layer that enables product teams across Roblox to integrate safety capabilities in hours, not months
• Partner closely with Trust & Safety ML, User Safety, Safety Operations, and product teams to translate platform needs into durable infrastructure
• Define backend standards and patterns across the team; raise the technical bar through code review, architecture guidance, and mentorship
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across networking, data, and compute at scale

What you'll need

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale backend/distributed systems and shipping high-quality systems to production
• 4+ years acting as a tech lead: setting direction, driving execution, and growing engineers at multiple levels
• Deep proficiency in Go or a similar compiled language
• BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience

Nice to have

• Experience with building developer platforms
• Experience with CQRS & Event Sourcing
• Experience with NoSQL databases at scale (DynamoDB, Cassandra, or similar)
• Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML platform integration, including pipelines, agentic workflows, HITL workflows or similar

Details

• Location: headquarters in San Mateo, CA
• Onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday
• Annual base salary range: $295,250 to $345,040 USD
• For US based roles only: the Company may not be able to employ candidates who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time